Related

30 thoughts on “Please help us test the new Collections feature”

It’s a nice idea; but I don’t see myself using it until an app comes along akin to the Last.fm Fingerprinter – one which would allow me to pick a directory on my computer / read from my media player’s library and automatically add each release to my collection.

According to WinAmp, I have 1,420 albums and 2,682 artists. According to my brain, I don’t have enough time to manually add these to my ‘Collection’ on MusicBrainz – especially since I don’t see any benefit.

If that data were to be used by third-parties though; that opens up a greater incentive to use the service. Last.fm already have the ‘My Library’ feature now – and it’s slowly cataloguing what music I own as it’s played – but 3 years ago it would’ve been ace to login / sign up to last.fm and for it to instantly know what music I was interested in based on what was in my ‘Collection’ on MusicBrainz, before I’d even played a single track.

I like this – it would be nice if you could add a specific release event so that rather than adding a release I could add, for example, the 1989 LP to my collection. And yes, a way of batch adding would be nice I’m not sure I have the time/patience to add thousands of releases manually.

There is some sort of clash between the way cookies are handled for musicbrainz.org and test.musicbrainz.org it seems. Removing just test.mb did not fix my problem (as ijabz indicated), but removing all of *musicbrainz.org’s ones did.

Maybe add an option to list all releases that you’ve edited, and have the ability to checkbox ones that you own then press ‘Add to Collections’… that would help finding releases that you might own, to an extent…

rob, are we not able to make edits on the test server? I tried to add a new artist (so I could test what happens to collections when an artist is deleted/modbotted/merged – and make sure collection preferences don’t stop artists being removed/merged) but just got redirected to a blank page (other than sidebars etc) with “editing error”?

1. I agree with grange85 about the desirability of linking to specific releases to really make this useful. That would also require some way of adding a release with no known release date, as is true of most of my early CDs that were originally released as LPS.

2. I would also like to see some way of adding a comment or categorization to each entry to specify exactly why it is on your list. Things like “own physical LP or CD”, “own electronic files of the release”, “own files of some of the tracks but not all” “do not own: on wishlist” and so on.

Although I’m guessing unlikely for first release I suggest you log enhancement tickets on the bug tracker for these ideas?

I also think it’d be cool to be able to enable on ones profile “allow others to view my collection”, which would do the obvious, but also add a “Owners” button to the release in the DB where you could see any owners that had made it public. From an editing community perspective, this could be invaluable in tracking someone down that might be able to provide a scan of liners for DB entry, or extra information etc.

I’m guessing this has already been thought about as a future step, just not logged?

Agreed with voiceinsideyou, sounds good. Maybe have a message board area for each artist(>release) that notifies all owners of a release (same as x commented on edit #x emails) of posted messages, that maybe ask a general/specific question about a release…

Another idea…. Once you have the collection loaded, an option for your to “Subscribe to all owned releases”…. Therefore subscribing you for voting on edits related to the releases you own.

For me this would mean me voting more as I would have the actual releases and would be able to check details…. As opposed to subscribing to the artist and getting edits on releases you have no idea about.

Then even opens up a possible “Missing Data on releases you own” report…. 🙂

Yeah, a prerequisite for that, ramzee would probably be the ability to subscribe to releases. As I understand, we don’t have because of yet another age-old prerequisite which is that edits can be attached to more than one DB entity (i.e a track change artist edit should really be able to be found via both old and new artists as well as the release).

Just adding (I originally posted this Oct 17th, but it’s still “awaiting moderation”):

“Maybe add an option to list all releases that you’ve edited, and have the ability to checkbox ones that you own then press ‘Add to Collections’… that would help finding releases that you might own, to an extent…”